Mother Teresa died in 1997 at age 87.
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Pope Francis recognized a miracle attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, making it the second she has made 11 years after her death. The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said.
Multiple news reports today are confirming that the Vatican will canonize pro-life heroine Mother Teresa next year on the anniversary of her death.
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910, she commenced serving the poor with the Sisters of Loreto in 1928 and arrived in India in 1929.
The order eventually expanded into a network of thousands of nuns who run hundreds of orphanages, soup kitchens, mobile clinics, homeless shelters and hospices in more than 130 countries around the world.
Pope John Paul II waived the requirement of waiting five years after a person’s death to pursue the path to sainthood and opened Mother Teresa’s Cause of Canonization less than two years after her death.
“We are very happy to hear about the canonization and we look forward to hearing more details in due course”, she told NBC News.
Relatives prayed to Mother Teresa and he recovered, leaving his doctors mystified, they said.
She set up her Missionaries of Charity, an order of nuns dedicated to care of the “poorest of the poor”, in Kolkata (Calcutta), in 1950 and made her headquarters in the Indian city for almost half a century.
Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta’s destitute and ill – work she continued even after becoming sick.
Mother Teresa, one of the world’s saintliest nuns, will be canonized by the Catholic Church, the Vatican announced Friday.
She is believed to have performed a miracle in the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumor.
The pontiff met the late nun in Rome in 1994 when he was a bishop, and joked a year ago that while he admired her strength, he “would have been scared if she had been my mother superior”.
She visited again in 1982 and 1983, the latter occasion being a secret visit to make peace with Liverpool City Council, then under Militant control, who wanted to close the Seel Street hostel because it said the accommodation it provided was sub-standard.
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Controversy of a different sort erupted in 2007 when a book revealed letters in which Mother Teresa confessed to a long struggle over a loss of the sense of God’s presence. “But when it is advantageous for church officials to move slowly, like the clergy sex cases, they move slowly”, she added.
